Hotel Price Ads: New Reporting & Bidding Options

Yesterday, new reporting and bidding functionality was released for advertisers running Hotel Price Ads on Google’s Hotel Finder platform. The new functionality includes device type and room bundle reporting to help advertisers determine how users engage differently across devices and when interacting with different types of ads, as well as enhanced bid multipliers to help optimize CPC for different users and booking scenarios.

Reporting changes

device_type (desktop, tablet, mobile)
Since the release of Hotel Finder for mobile, advertisers have been requesting the ability to report on the type of device used for a given click. This is an important data point not only because the mobile Hotel Finder experience is new and it is important to analyze performance there separately, but also because mobile auctions are typically different than desktop auctions. Further, mobile visitors research, decide, and book differently once they land on site.

Screen Shot 2013-09-12 at 8.45.19 AMroom_bundle (true, false)
The second reporting change in this update is around room bundles. Clicks are now reported as having come in on room bundle or not via a true/false designation. The room bundle functionality was recently launched in Hotel Finder, giving users many more options for the type of room they want to book. While this functionality is a bit buried at the moment, our expectation is that if embraced by users and advertisers, it could be more exposed or even added as a search filter.

Bidding changes

In addition to the reporting changes described above, there are two very important updates to the bidding functionality for Hotel Price Ads campaigns. (As a quick recap, HPA bidding works like this: advertisers have the ability to bid either a flat rate or a percentage of the room cost. This cost is multiplied by the number of nights that a user is booking.) Up until today, advertisers could choose to select multipliers across two other sets of values: the site a user came from (or search_type,) and/or the country that the user was from.

These multipliers have proven very valuable for optimizing to increase traffic volume and to increase efficiency for advertisers, so we’re excited to see two new multipliers added into the mix.

DeviceType
The device type multiplier accepts a value of 0-10 to be applied to your bid when a user fits that specific profile. If you don’t want to participate in mobile because your site is not optimized, you might set this multiplier to 0. To be less aggressive but still participate in the auction you might set your multiplier to .6, and if you wanted to be really aggressive you might set it to 2.5, and so on.

LengthOfStay
The use case for adding a multiplier by a length of stay is really an interesting one. Long stays can be a big driver of revenue for hotels, which can make acquiring users researching long stays very interesting. Because in the Hotel Price Ads cost model the effective CPC is partially determined by the number of nights a user is staying, it can be very expensive to acquire those users. Consider a market like Las Vegas, where advertisers might do very well to compete for users looking to stay for a single night, but might not convert well on a user looking to stay for six nights. On the flip side, it might be very lucrative to acquire user looking to book nine nights in the Caribbean. The length of stay multiplier allows advertisers to adjust the bid by the number of nights a user is looking for.

Next steps

We’re excited to see the new functionality. While it complicates things a bit, it more importantly creates very granular controls for advertisers to be able to better optimize campaigns and intelligently invest in Hotel Price Ads. There has been a clear increase in the speed at which new functionality is being added to the program, showing that Google is listening to advertisers and investing in their success.

We’ve found that reporting granularly on campaign performance and then optimizing bid levers based on those insights can have dramatic results in terms of traffic, revenue, and return on investment. If you’re a Koddi client, then you can start using these multipliers now by working with your account team. If you’d like to discuss the best way to apply this new functionality to your campaign please feel free to get in touch.

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